from the copyright-destroying-learning dept

We've written a few times now about Sci-Hub -- the website put together by Alexandra Elbakyan, an academic from Kazakhstan. It's a somewhat creative hack on the idea that many academics are more than willing to share PDFs of useful research with each other, basically building a search engine of such research, which is actually stored in a different repository (called LibGen). But the really clever part of Sci-Hub was that it also had some people sharing their login tokens to various research databases, so that if the LibGen doesn't have the document, Sci-Hub uses a login to retrieve the document, deliver it to the user who requested it and then uploads it to LibGen to make it available for anyone else. Publishing giant Elsevier has been particularly upset by all of this -- despite the fact that its argument appears to go 100% against the stated purpose of copyright law.

Remember, this isn't about sharing some sort of commercial music or video or anything. This is about academic research, much of which has been paid for with public tax dollars, and which Elsevier paid no money to create. Elsevier not only gets academics to submit papers for publishing, but to also hand over their copyrights to Elsevier. In some subject areas, it even makes the academics pay to submit their papers for publishing. Then Elsevier gets free editing help from other academics who do peer review for free. Some publications even have unpaid editors as well. And then Elsevier goes out and charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to universities for research it had no hand in creating, for which it paid no money, but where it gets the copyright.

And, of course, copyright had absolutely no incentive in getting this research done in the first place. It's done by academics who are pursuing the subject because of their own interests and the general requirements pushed by universities to get their faculty to publish.

In short, copyright has no role here whatsoever other than to enrich Elsevier. That seems fairly problematic.

Either way, back in December, Elsevier was able to score an injunction against Sci-Hub, such that it lost its domain. As we noted at the time, it was only starting the mole whac'ing process, as Sci-Hub immediately moved to a new domain.

In the meantime, this quixotic, and anti-knowledge, anti-education campaign by Elsevier to shut down such a useful tool has only resulted in greater and greater attention for Sci-Hub. Tons of people had never heard of the site before, but the continuing news coverage, which increases each time Elsevier gets petulant and tries to take it down again, has only served as useful advertising for a useful tool.

Elsevier management might want to reconsider its strategy here, seeing as whatever money it's wasting on its lawyers seems to actually be serving as marketing dollars for Sci-Hub.

from the total-failures dept

We've pointed out for years that the whac-a-mole game of entertainment industry organizations trying to take down entire websites was a really dumb idea. Not only would it create significant collateral damage for legitimate sites, but it makes things even worse in terms of actually preventing access to content. That's because once the content is out there, it's out there. And as you shut down big sites, you pretty much guarantee that the same content will be just as widely available, but in a more distributed manner, making it that much harder for those focusing on takedowns to be effective. It appears that this is exactly what's happening. Torrentfreak recently pointed out attention to an article by James Brandes, who works for an anti-piracy company, but who says that site takedowns are actually making his job a lot harder.

So is this wack-a-mole policy working? No. It’s plainly evident that every single time a site is blocked at the ISP level, new URLs take their place. This has further ramifications for content owners and their agents.

As an anti-piracy agent, I can report that this is making life more difficult particularly with regards to DMCA submissions to Google. But why? During an anti-piracy project, I send Notices to Google to remove infringing results that appear via their search engine. In the past, this may have included results for The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, & H33T. The major problem now is that whilst infringing search results for the aforementioned torrent sites have been removed by Google, new infringing search results appear constantly as a consequence of these sites being forced to use proxies & alternative URLs. Predictably, this creates far more work for content owners (particularly for small independent labels who are not members of the BPI) and their agents. For example, I’d estimate that well over 5 million additional search results have been removed from Google as a result of sites using alternative URLs. Just check the following Google Transparency for piratebayalternative and you’ll see why I’ve reached this conclusion! So it’s certainly fair to say that the blocking policy is perhaps backfiring badly.

This shouldn't be surprising. Pretty much anyone who has any experience with this kind of thing could have predicted exactly that. And yet, the recording and movie industries keep pushing for site blocking in the completely ridiculous belief that it will actually do something useful.

from the no-prizes dept

Around and around we go, when the futility will stop, nobody knows. I'm referring, of course, to a large swath of government and industry groups around the world that apparently just love to play whac-a-mole with torrent sites, which don't host infringing files. If you're not familiar with the carnival game of the same name, it goes something like this. A mole pops out of a hole and you bludgeon that little bastard with a man-hammer. Then another one pops up from another hole. After bashing that one, another one pops out elsewhere. This goes on for exactly as much time as it takes the person playing to decide it would be much more productive to consume thirty corn dogs and puke all over themselves.

The latest challenger in this stupid, stupid game? The Philippines. At the request of the Filipino record industry, with some help from their US counterparts, the government seized infamous torrent tracker site Kickass Torrents. The government notes that they're only following the lead of the United Kingdom, who similarly censored KAT back in February. So, once again, we have private industry managing to get government to act as their knee-cap hit squad. Rather, that would be a decent description if the mole wasn't able to simply pop back up out of another hole, which it did.

Local record labels and the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry said that the torrent site was doing “irreparable damages” to the music industry and following a formal complaint the authorities resorted to seize of the main domain name. The torrent site hasn’t given up and is operating as usual under a new domain name.

In other words, this was a pointless exercise in parlor game futility. Instead of finding new ways to compete, the recording industry would rather whack away at those pesky moles. My advice? Well, I suggest, as always, corn dogs.

from the whac-whac-whac-a-mole dept

We've been covering the attempts by Dutch anti-piracy operator BREIN to play a legal game of whac-a-mole to block The Pirate Bay by forcing ISPs to block access, then blocking proxies that provide access, and now blocking anyone from even talking about ways to get to The Pirate Bay. Bizarrely, a court in The Hague has agreed, and has come out in favor of blocking the Dutch Pirate Party from even discussing some of this stuff:

The Court specifically ruled that the Party’s reverse proxy has to remain offline. It was further ordered that Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses have to be filtered from the Pirate Party’s generic proxy. In addition the Pirate Party can’t link to other websites that allow the public to bypass the blockade. These orders are only valid when paired with an encouragement to circumvent.

Basically, telling people how to get around a block, even if it's linking to a general proxy (not a specific one) is now barred in the Netherlands. The fact that the court now is telling proxies how they can work is a huge overreach. That seems like a pretty blatant restriction on free speech. The thing is, do the folks at BREIN actually think this charade is effective? All it seems to be doing is enraging tons of people in the Netherlands, and doing absolutely nothing to stop them from going to The Pirate Bay.

from the judicial-miscarriage dept

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting, briefly, Tim Kuik, the head of BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group that has been fighting against file sharing on a variety of fronts. We had an enjoyable conversation (as part of a larger discussion) in which he insisted that he and BREIN recognized the future opportunities of the digital market, and that BREIN was not interested in trying to put the genie back in the bottle -- in response to my suggestion that too many in the industry were trying to do exactly that. That may be true, but it's difficult to see how that's the case when immediately after this we hear of stories about BREIN going to court to shut down a proxy by the Dutch Pirate Party to point people to The Pirate Bay -- a site that BREIN has forced ISPs to block.

Of course, blocking sites on the web is impossible, and the silly continued whac-a-mole against proxies seems like a huge waste of time and resources that could have been put towards helping to develop compelling new business models. But, a much bigger concern is the process by which this latest proxy was shut down. Or, rather, I should note it's not so much the process, but the lack of due process. That is, a court ordered the proxy to be taken down without allowing the Dutch Pirate Party to testify on its own behalf:

The Pirate Party was not heard in the matter (ex parte) and according to board member “blauwbaard” the judge ignored their requests to be heard.

“The judge has decided to ignore our express and valid request to have the injunction either denied flat-out, or to at least be heard in the matter before a decision was made,” blauwbaard states in a response.

“This decision is even more strange because BREIN was allowed to bring over 20 pages of arguments to convince the judge to stretch a quaint rule of IP-law, meant to block the sudden appearance of mass quantities of counterfeited goods, far enough to be applied to the website of a political party.”

A court ordering a website taken down without allowing the site itself to speak on its behalf? That seems pretty extreme. A proxy is simply a redirect in a case like this. It's something just about anyone can do, and chasing after each and every proxy -- and then not allowing them to speak for themselves in court, seems like a perfect example of trying to put the genie back in the bottle, no matter how much BREIN insists that's not their goal.

And, unfortunately, the story gets even worse, the more it moves forward. The Dutch Pirate Party replaced their proxy with a page that
linked to other proxies as well as an explanation of their position. This seems like a classic free speech situation. Except... BREIN claimed that even those links to other proxies violated the injunction, and have demanded the party take them down as well. The Pirate Party appears to be getting ready to fight this, noting that BREIN keeps trying to rewrite the specifics of the court's order (i.e., trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle) every time a different website shows how ridiculous it is to ban internet access to a website.

from the standing-its-ground dept

The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is somewhat famous for its overreaching efforts. While it succeeded in getting ISPs to block The Pirate Bay's website, it's been going after a bunch of proxy sites that have helped people get around the block. Its latest move may run into some difficulty however. The Dutch Pirate Party has its own proxy offering, and BREIN is demanding they turn it off. The Pirate Party, however, is standing its ground. As TorrentFreak reports:

Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court.

Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

The larger point in all of this, of course, is just how completely and utterly useless BREIN's game of whac-a-mole is. There are so many proxy sites out there, and many are used for perfectly legitimate reasons. Trying to block every single one of them is a fool's errand. Those who want to go to TPB will figure out ways to get there.

from the offense-against-intellectual-property dept

Slashdot points us to a fascinating story of a programmer named Marvin Wimberly, who is facing charges for sabotaging the famous Whac-A-Mole games with a logic bomb that would "break" the machines after a pre-determined number of times that it was turned on and off. The idea was that each time these broke, Wimberly would be called in for a repair. Of course, with each "repair," he'd install another logic bomb. Since he was the only one who knew the real "problem," he figured it was a form of job security. His company couldn't let him go, because no one else could fix the problem.

Of course, now that it's been discovered he's apparently facing 15 years in prison. What's a bit odd, though, is the statute under which he's being charged. It's a Florida state law for "offenses against intellectual property." Reading through the statute, it seems like a rather odd use of the phrase "intellectual property."

Whoever willfully, knowingly, and without authorization modifies data, programs, or supporting documentation residing or existing internal or external to a computer, computer system, or computer network commits an offense against intellectual property.